With the development of broadband services and the variety of demand of users, the users are not satisfied with traditional Internet services such as webpage browsing or file downloading any longer, and the demand of the users for Video on Demand, remote education, stock information, video conference, etc. has grown rapidly. With the spread of multicast services, especially video services, demand for supporting functions and performance of the multicast services has been brought forward on devices. Furthermore, in order to compete with traditional broadcast and television networks, demand for faster, more secure, and more flexible operation on the multicast services have been brought forward in the Internet.
One of key technologies for processing the multicast services is a sending mode of service authority, that is, how an operator authorizes a terminal user to watch a video program or enjoys other services. The sending mode of service authority directly determines the flexibility of the multicast services and the form of providing the multicast services. A right suite mode is adopted in the conventional sending method of the multicast services, that is, terminal users in a region are divided into user groups with different watching demand, and the different user groups are provided with different templates so as to make the terminal users acquire services within scopes of their service authorities, respectively. The template is authority to watch a series of programs. For example, it is supposed that there are three channels, channel C1, channel C2 and channel C3, in a local system, while there are six users, i.e., users from U1 to U6 in a region. Three templates, i.e., template P1, template P2 and template P3, are set and the authority to watch channels in each of the templates is configured with the help of the analysis on the demand of the users. Here, template P1 has the authority to watch channel C1, template P2 has the authority to watch channel C1 and channel C2, while template P3 has the authority to watch channel C1, channel C2 and channel C3. In order to enable a user to watch a program, the user should be bound to one of the templates. For example, if user U1 is bound to template P1, user U1 only has the user authority to watch programs of channel C1; if user U1 is bound to template P3, the user authority of user U1 is to watch the programs of channel C1, channel C2 and channel C3.
At present, a multicast service processing system mainly includes two aspects of task in the course of multicast service processing: one is profile establishing and profile binding; the other is to authenticate user's authority of a program. To establish the template is to add authority of related program lists into a template list; to bind the template is to add related templates into a user list. Thus, association relation among the three lists, i.e., the user list, the template list and the program list, is built. To authenticate the authority of a program of a user is as follows: based on a source port and a multicast address carried in an Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) message from a user and through querying the association relation among the three lists, i.e., the user list, the template list and the program list, determining whether the user who belongs to the source port and the multicast address has the authority to watch a certain program, and transmitting corresponding program streams to the user that has the authority, otherwise, not transmitting the corresponding program streams.
There are following disadvantages in the conventional method mentioned above for processing multicast services.
In one aspect, user authority can not be configured flexibly. Since the user authority is configured using the template mode, the user may be bound to one of the templates or is not bound to any of the templates, that is, the user has no authority. In the above examples, if the user is only expected to watch the programs of channel C1 and channel C3, none of the existing three templates can meet the demand of the user authority and based on the conventional processing method, a new template must be generated to meet the demand. However, program sources are very rich in practical applications, it is impossible to completely enumerate all combinations of various program sources using different templates. Thus, the flexibility of configuring the user authority is limited.
In another aspect, means for processing the user authority of a superuser has relatively great limitation. The superuser refers to a user who need not to be authenticated the authority of a program of the user. Generally, in order to enable the superuser to watch programs, a template containing the authority of programs of all channels is generated in the conventional template configuration mode and the template is bound to the superuser. The method achieves the use of the superuser to some extent, but in fact, the superuser is dealt with as a super ordinary user, which is shown in the following aspects: first, when a program source is added, the templates of all the superusers need to be revised, and thus a null configuration and instant availability for superusers cannot be achieved; second, since it is unable to distinguish the superuser from an ordinary user on a system side, stream classification and priority processing for the superuser cannot be implemented; third, the authority of a program of a certain user cannot be revised separately, while the revision to the template may affect all the users bound to the template.
To sum up, since the user authority is configured through binding of the template and the user, the authority of a program cannot be added or deleted for a single user, which greatly limits the flexibility of the processing of multicast services. The revision to the template to which a certain user is bound may inevitably influence authority of all users that are bound to the template, and have an impact on individualized services for users.